


Take care not to fall, darling (it's a long way down)

by ErzaWritesThings



Category: Annihilation (2018), Annihilation - Fandom
Genre: Anya loses her mind a little bit there, Anya's point of view, Blood, Canon Compliant, Death, Gore, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, Paranoia, and also poor Cass, and she's so in love with Cass, basically Anya's descent into madness, but that's what I call it, dialogue is mostly from the movie, it's not officially called a mockingbear, it's once again not a happy one people, people end up dead, poor Anya, she goes through so much shit, that shit drives people mad, the Shimmer is bad news, the Shimmer messes with her mind, the mockingbear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-16
Updated: 2018-03-16
Packaged: 2019-04-01 05:07:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13991109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ErzaWritesThings/pseuds/ErzaWritesThings
Summary: From the last team that had gone in, only one had returned, and Anya knew he was currently in a coma and not expected to wake up anytime soon, if at all. The most popular theories on the soldiers that hadn’t returned were that they’d either been killed by something, or they’d gone mad and killed each other.Considering this place, Anya was starting to suspect it was the latter.





	Take care not to fall, darling (it's a long way down)

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this is the first attempt I've ever made at writing a character's thought process as they slowly lose their sense of reality and turn into a paranoid mess. All things considered, I figured I did fairly well for a first time. Either way, I had fun writing it, and that's what matters.
> 
> A large part of the dialogue is directly from the film; this piece is more about trying to put Anya's thought process onto paper than the actual plot of the movie, like a kind of character study, so I didn't pay as much attention to original dialogue as I probably could have.
> 
> As has become my habit in notes like these, enjoy and lemme know your thoughts!

It’d been slowly driving her mad since the moment she’d walked through the thin, soap bubble-like barrier.

Anya could almost feel it, the Shimmer or whatever the hell it actually was, seeping into her body, into her cells, into every strand of her DNA, mutating it, slowly but surely changing her, bit by bit. It was like an itch, so faint she could barely feel it, yet somehow so present that she couldn’t ignore it.

Sometimes, she found herself absently scratching at her skin, watching as the faint white lines her nails left behind faded over, wondering if her skin would still look like this in a couple of days. Wondering if the Shimmer was going to turn her into a monster, hybridize her like it had the alligator that had almost killed Josie.

It’d had concentric rows of teeth, like a shark.

Anya was pretty sure alligators weren’t supposed to have the teeth of a shark.

She wondered if her teeth would change, or if they’d just fall out, or even rot away inside her very mouth.

This place really wasn’t natural.

She hadn’t even wanted to go. She was a paramedic, not a soldier. She didn’t belong in a place like this. But Cass had wanted to go, wanted to go investigate from the inside out and get data on site, and no way in hell Anya was letting Cass jump into some never before seen phenomenon without her. Especially when they still weren’t sure what the phenomenon actually did, or how it affected the people went in.

So Anya had gone, if only because Cass went.

And she’d been regretting it since.

Nothing about this place felt right. The flowers Lena had noted were strange, the alligator-shark was even stranger - even the air didn’t feel right here. It felt cloying, heavier than it was supposed to, and it had a faintly metallic taste that clung to the back of the throat and made Anya wholly uncomfortable.

The abandoned military base they stumbled across five or six days into the mission was just plain creepy.

It couldn’t have been empty for more than a year and a half. It looked like it’d been empty for at least double that, vines already starting to climb up the sides of the buildings closest to the forest, the chain link fences so rusty they were barely holding together. The concrete road was cracked and broken and chunks of grass and weeds were struggling through to reach the strangely distorted sun.

‘’Mess hall is that way, right?’’ Ventress pointed at one of the larger structures. ‘’We’ll camp there for the night.’’

That sounded good to Anya - she was perfectly okay with any place that had a ceiling to block out the sky. Something about looking up and finding the surface of what looked like a giant bubble of soap, like a thin, all-compassing oil slick, distorting the clouds and making the sunlight look just wrong made Anya a little nauseous.

She headed inside gratefully, taking in the large hall that was their home for the night. The tables had been shoved aside to leave most of it empty. Pinned to the wall was evidence that it had been used as a base before, a watch roster carefully written out and the names dutifully ticked off to show the routine was being followed. Or had been followed, at least. From the last team that had gone in, only one had returned, and Anya knew he was currently in a coma and not expected to wake up anytime soon, if at all.

The most popular theories on the soldiers that hadn’t returned were that they’d either been killed by something, or they’d gone mad and killed each other.

Considering this place, Anya was starting to suspect it was the latter.

Most of the time since stepping in, she felt like she was going mad too.

‘’For the next ones…’’ Josie muttered, standing by one of the tables. She was holding a ziploc bag. Something small and square was in it. Anya made her way over, curious, standing next to Cass and briefly squeezing her shoulder when the brunette gave her a brief smile.

‘’It’s a memory card,’’ Josie said, ‘’I think I can play it.’’

Anya crowded a little closer so she could properly see the small screen of Josie’s handheld video camera.

What she saw horrified her.

It was the team before theirs, trained soldiers, visibly losing their minds bit by bit. One of them, she believed the guy who’d actually survived the Shimmer (if barely), cut into the belly of one of his teammates, methodically sawing out a flap of skin and pulling it away. What was revealed underneath almost made Anya gag.

She was a paramedic, she’d seen plenty of blood and guts over the years.

She’d never seen someone’s insides move and writhe around like snakes.

Anya watched the soldier hook a hand under one of the slithering pieces of intestine and pull it out, shining a torch on it to show it move across his hand, and felt sick.

Josie quickly snapped the screen of the camera shut.

‘’There was something alive in that man.’’ Cass sounded like she was ready to throw up.

‘’It was a trick of the light,’’ Anya responded, feeling her stomach rebel. Because it hadn’t been a trick of the light. It had very obviously not been a trick of the light. But that was not something Anya was ready to acknowledge right now. They were inside the Shimmer, the same thing that had caused that soldier’s guts to act like a nest of snakes. Anya did not want to think of what it was doing to her own DNA right now. She needed the denial.

‘’That was not a trick of the light!’’ Cass argued. ‘’You saw that! That was real!’’

‘’I’ve been a paramedic for ten years! I’ve scraped enough bodies off roads to know that shit doesn’t always look as it should! It was a trick of the light,’’ Anya insisted.

‘’It was not a trick of the light! Look at it again, Anya!’’

‘’Dammit, Sheppard, no! I’m not going to look at it again!’’ Anya spat back in frustration. She never wanted to see those images again. Why couldn’t Cass understand that she needed the denial right now?

Cass just sighed at her, stalking off.

Anya frowned. It wasn’t safe to go off by themselves. The alligator-shark was enough proof of that. It’d very nearly killed Josie, had had a snap at Anya herself, and had had a good shot at hurting Lena amongst others. She hurried after Cass. ‘’Where are you going?’’

They ended up in a very familiar room. The pool, the same one Anya had seen the soldier use to wash his knife clean after gutting his teammate. At the deep end, there was enough water left to reach just past the ankle, green with filth and algae. It stank like a swamp, the sickly smell of rot most prevalent of all.

Against the back wall of the pool were the twisted, mutated remains of the soldier in the video. His skull pushed several feet up the wall, jaw torn away, a strange kind of mold-like vines binding the rest of his body against the wall, encompassing his entire torso save for the hole that had been cut into his belly.

Anya, who on principle had refused to enter the water, watched Josie bend down and pick something off the bottom of the pool. It was the knife used in the video. She dropped it quickly.

‘’I don’t think I want to stay here anymore…’’

‘’Too late for that,’’ Ventress responded. ‘’There’s not enough daylight to go outside anymore.’’

Anya sighed, reaching out for Josie to help her out of the water. ‘’C’mon Josie, let’s go outside.’’

* * *

 

They set up camp in the mess hall as planned; Ventress was right about it being too dark outside to travel further anymore. Anya was glad for it. This place was creepy enough without having to stumble around blindly in the dark.

Since they were inside, tents were not needed, which left just their sleeping bags and the thin mats they used to make the ground a little more comfortable. Anya had hers rolled out and ready in moments, making sure to be away from the windows. They weren’t secure, and right now, they didn’t have the means to change that, so the best idea was to just not lie directly under or next to one of them.

Ventress took first watch, and second would be Lena’s.

Anya hoped she’d be able to sleep before it was her turn to be lookout, because she was exhausted and didn’t think she could go another night entirely without sleep. It’d be even better if she didn’t have any nightmares, but Anya had just about given up hope on that already; there hadn’t been a night she hadn’t had bad dreams since stepping into the Shimmer.

The others weren’t much better, she knew. Every time she’d been shocked awake, heart racing and a sheen of sweat on her skin, she’d been able to see the others, Cass and Josie especially, move restlessly in their own sleeping bags. They had not slept any better since getting here than Anya had.

The only one of them who seemed even remotely okay being in this place was Lena.

Anya punched her small pillow a couple of times to make it more comfortable, grateful that Cass had chosen to lie within arm’s reach so Anya could reach over to hold her hand. They shared a quiet smile for a moment, which was enough to reassure Anya to the point she could ignore the writhing, morphing shadows (monsters, oh they looked like monsters, hunting them down one by one, leering down at their prey) on the walls and close her eyes to get some sleep.

Or try to, at least. Either way, it was rest of a kind.

It did not last for long, though.

The screech of rusted metal being torn apart woke Anya with a start, and she was up and out of her sleeping bag in seconds, scrambling for her rifle. ‘’What was that sound?!’’

‘’Something tore through the fence,’’ Lena was peering through a pair of night binoculars. ‘’I don’t see anything.’’

Anya clutched her rifle a little closer. The fact that they couldn’t see anything didn’t mean nothing was there. Anything was possible in this place. Her hands itched against the metal of her rifle. Sweat poured down her forehead as she strained to see through the darkness.

For long, long seconds, there was only deadly silence.

The scream that broke it was like icy water down Anya’s back. She would recognize that voice anywhere.

‘’Cass!’’ Anya burst through the door, feeling the cold night air hit her, frantically searching for any sign of movement. ‘’Cass!’’

More screams, the terror and pain in them enough to bring tears to Anya’s eyes. Low, rumbling growls, too, like from a wild animal.

‘’That way! Sheppard!’’ Lena rushed by with her own rifle. ‘’Sheppard!’’

Anya felt panic closing up her throat, making it hard to breathe as she sprinted towards the fence, after Cass’ terrified screams. ‘’Cass!’’

Abruptly, the screams cut off. The only sounds left behind were some rustling and low rumbles from the forest, the team yelling Cass’ name, and Anya’s own racing heartbeat in her ears.

It was dark and silent.

‘’She’s gone,’’ Lena panted out.

‘’We need to go back inside. It’s not safe.’’ Ventress added.

It was Josie’s hand on Anya’s arm that snapped her out of her stupor. Anya stumbled after her blindly, nearly tripping over her feet several times before Josie deposited her back on her sleeping bag.

‘’Will you be alright?’’

Anya stared up at her blankly, somehow managing to nod. It was enough for Josie, who awkwardly patted her shoulder before scampering off to her own sleeping bag.

Anya watched Lena take up guard again and Ventress settle in her own sleeping bag, wondering how they could act so normal when one of their own had just been taken. When Cass - oh God, Cass - had been dragged away by God knows what. She looked away from them, and found herself staring at Cass’ sleeping bag instead.

The sight of it had something deep inside her cracking.

The tears came fast but quiet, dripping down her cheeks and wetting her shirt until most of her chest was soaked through. She swallowed back the sobs with effort, biting back the keens of loss that wanted to tear from her throat.

Somehow, she felt that if she let them out, it would make everything real. The Shimmer had already taken Cass from her, she wouldn’t let it have her grief too.

Anya didn’t sleep for the rest of the night.

* * *

 

They headed out the next morning as soon as the sun rose.

In daylight, early and weak as it was, the place where the fence had been torn open during the night was easily visible. Anya tried not to look at the way it had been ripped apart as they ducked through the opening, marching into the forest.

Some of the lower branches had been broken, and at one tree, some of the bark had been stripped away. Smears of red had been left against the wood. Looking at it made Anya feel sick. Not like she was about to throw up, but more the kind of sick that made her feel like the bottom had just dropped out of her stomach. It was hard to keep her mouth shut and watch the others ignore what had just happened.

She lasted until they crossed a small clearing, and another broken branch smeared with blood caught her attention.

‘’What about Cass?’’ Anya asked, a tad aggressively, when Ventress seemed to ignore the sign. ‘’What if she’s still alive?’’

It was a vain hope, but Anya clung to it regardless. She didn’t want Cass to be dead. Even if she was injured Anya could still help her. She’d carry Cass back out of the Shimmer if she had to, all six days of walking, back to where it was safe and the very world wasn’t playing games with them.

‘’I’ll go look,’’ Lena volunteered, and then added ‘’alone,’’ when Anya was about to volunteer to join her. Anya frowned but backed down when Ventress shot her a warning glance. She knew better than to go against the chain of command - Ventress, in Anya’s experience, could be seriously tough when someone did not do as told.

Though she didn’t like this at all. Cass was her best friend. Lena barely even knew Cass anyway. They’d met only days ago. If anyone should go look for her, it was Anya.

Anya paced while she waited, biting at the nails of her free hand.

From the corners of her eyes, she was sure she could see the shadows moving. Or maybe it was the trees themselves that were moving. At one point there was a young tree, a sapling still, that Anya was sure had been planted two feet to the right of its current position when they’d entered the clearing.

This place was very, very wrong.

She tried to keep an eye on the sapling as she paced, hardly daring to blink in case it was gone when she opened her eyes again. Anya bit harder at her thumb and wished, not for the first time, that she had never decided to go into the Shimmer, and that she’d talked Cass out of going too.

It took nearly half an hour for Lena to return.

‘’And? Did you find her?’’

‘’Yeah,’’ Lena said, pausing for a moment and not quite meeting Anya’s eyes. ‘’She’s dead.’’ She stalked out of the clearing, Ventress and Josie quickly following.

For a few seconds, Anya stood dumbly in the middle of the clearing, trying to wrap her head around the fact that her best friend was gone. Murdered. And she didn’t even have a body to bury. Her chest felt vaguely like that time she’d been in kickboxing class and a move had gone wrong; like her ribs had just been kicked in, leaving her gasping in pain and unable to breathe.

She managed to force her feet into motion, staggering after the others. Her hands trembled against the metal of her rifle. They itched. They’d been itching a lot the last day or so.

As she made her way out of the clearing, she caught a slight movement from the corner of her eyes.

The sapling wasn’t where she’d last seen it anymore.

She quickened her pace a little.

* * *

 

They walked for another day or so, until they reached a small village that had been evacuated just before the Shimmer had swallowed it whole. The plants were strange. They looked like flowering shrubs, except that they grew in the shape of humans.

Anya commandeered a plastic outdoor chair, laying her rifle over her lap. She was tired from walking all day, and she damn well deserved a break.

‘’They’ve grown this way,’’ Lena commented, crouching near one of the shrubs.

Anya shook her head. ‘’That doesn’t make any sense.’’

‘’I think it does,’’ Josie responded. She looked like she’d just come to a realization. ‘’At first I thought the radio waves were blocked by the Shimmer, and that’s why no one inside could communicate with base or GPS, but the light waves aren’t blocked, they’re refracted, and,’’ she paused to rummage through her pack and take out a comm, turning it on to listen to the crackle, ‘’it’s the same with radio waves.’’

Anya frowned, wondering what she was getting at. What did radio waves have to do with human-shaped shrubbery?

‘’The signals aren’t gone,’’ Josie continued, ‘’They’re scrambled.’’ She paused to look at Lena. Anya followed her gaze. Lena had broken off a small leaf.

‘’That leaf in your hand… do you know what you’d get if you sequenced it?’’

‘’What?’’ Lena asked.

‘’Human Hox genes.’’

Anya gave another frown. ‘’Hox? What is Hox?’’

‘’They’re the genes that define physical structure,’’ Lena responded. ‘’But that’s literally impossible.’’

‘’It’s literally what’s happening. The plants have human body plan.’’ Josie retorted. ‘’The Shimmer… it doesn’t just refract light and radio waves. It’s a prism that refracts everything. Animal DNA, plant DNA… all DNA.’’

Anya didn’t like the sound of that at all. She had a suspicion what Josie was getting at. A pretty solid suspicion. It made her hands itch. She tried to keep her voice from trembling. ‘’What do you mean, ‘all DNA’?’’

‘’She’s talking about our DNA,’’ Ventress commented, eating a couple of nuts from their rations. ‘’She’s talking about us.’’

It was silent after that. Lena tossed away the leaf she had taken, and Josie went about packing her comms back into her pack. Anya clenched her hands into fists, staring down at her rifle, thinking about something scrambling her very DNA. It had her shuddering in her rickety plastic chair. All things considered, she’d rather be killed by something than slowly be turned into whatever the hell this place was changing her into.

* * *

 

They camped out in one of the abandoned houses in the town. Anya tried not to jump at shadows as she rolled out her sleeping bag, tucking it into a corner away from everyone else, and away from the windows. Though the house had been secured, searched for signs of life before all doors and windows had been barred, Anya didn’t trust it.

She had a very, very bad feeling, and that had her paranoid and searching around her for threats she couldn’t find.

Somehow she was sure they were there anyway, even if she could not see or hear them.

They were there. She was sure of it. In the shadows, maybe, or hiding behind the mantlepiece, or under the scarce furniture. Watching. Waiting to strike.

Anya shuddered to herself, sitting on her sleeping bag with her back to the wall. It felt like she couldn’t trust her surroundings well enough to turn her back on them. Or the people with her. They felt off. Had felt off for a while now, Anya realized. She just hadn’t paid any attention to it, too busy keeping an eye on Cass to ensure she wouldn’t get hurt.

But Cass was dead now - dragged off by a wild animal and killed… or maybe one of them had done it.

She eyed Lena cautiously, then moved her gaze to Ventress and Josie. Maybe the moving shadows had crawled into them and made them kill Cass, and then lie about it to Anya. Maybe. Anything was possible here.

Here, where Cass was dead and trees moved and her very DNA was being refracted by a phenomenon she didn’t understand.

The palm of her hand itched again. She scratched at it absentmindedly, letting out a little grunt of annoyance when that only made it worse. Maybe she’d accidentally touched a nettle or something, she thought to herself as she inspected her skin for stings. But it weren’t nettles.

The lines on the palm of her hand slithered and wormed around slowly, moving across her hand in a way that was wholly unnatural. Her fingerprints morphed under her horrified gaze, motile in a way that they should absolutely not be.

It was inside her.

Whatever this Shimmer thing was, it was inside her.

It was changing her.

The proof was quite literally writhing across her skin. Mutating her very DNA, refracting it, driving her to madness, snapping at her heels like a predator hungry for a kill.

It made her feel sick. She’d already lost Cass (murdered by animal or human, she was not sure), she was in the process of losing her sanity, and now she was losing her humanity too. Anya swallowed back bile, quickly clenching her hand into a fist and sticking it under her shirt so she wouldn’t have to look at it anymore.

If she concentrated, she could almost feel her handprint moving around.

She looked up and found Lena staring at her. Like she was sizing Anya up. The look in those eyes had all of Anya’s hackles rising, an instinctive fight or flight response making her tense up automatically.

Lena looked away.

Anya did not relax.

She was sure of it now. That look… that was the look of a cold blooded killer. Lena had killed Cass, Anya just knew it. After all, it’d been Lena who’d been on guard when Cass had been dragged away, and she had been the one to raise the alarm in the first place. She could have somehow faked the sound of the fence tearing, and she could’ve sneaked out beforehand to cut it apart.

But she’d been in Anya’s line of sight when Cass had been dragged away.

Ventress and Josie, however, had not been in Anya’s line of sight.

They’d killed her together, Anya realized to herself. Not Josie, because Josie could never kill anyone, but Ventress and Lena. They’d somehow made those growling noises to make Anya think it was an animal attack, and then they’d murdered Cass.

The shadows had crawled into their brains and taken them over from the inside out.

Were they even human anymore? Did they count as people?

Anya didn’t know, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to wait to find out. She warily shuffled away from her sleeping bag to turn on one of the portable lights they’d brought along. Aiming it at her sleeping bag stopped shadows from forming on the wall behind it. That should leave Anya safe while she figured out what to do now that her team wasn’t her team anymore. Now that she was surrounded by murderers.

She laid down, back to the wall, closing her eyes most of the way so she looked like she was sleeping. She couldn’t sleep, though. God knows what they’d do to her if they caught her while she couldn’t defend herself. They’d kill her like they killed Cass.

Anya feigned sleep for a couple of hours, making sure her sleeping bag hid the tenseness of her body, the way she clutched her army-issue knife between her (inhuman, wrong, so, so wrong) hands.

It was a very tense couple of hours, but eventually, the shadows seemed to realize their human bodies needed sleep and laid down to rest. Anya waited for another half hour, just to be sure they were really out, and then sat up.

First things first.

She had to disarm them. And maybe tie them up too, better safe than sorry, after all. Yes, that sounded like a good plan. Shadows that didn’t have weapons and couldn’t move, could’t hurt her.

She crept over to Ventress first, quietly taking the rifle that lay at her side, taking care not to wake her up. But what if she woke up while Anya was tying her up? She thought that over for a moment, before bringing up the rifle and smashing the butt of it into the side of Ventress’ head. The shadow jerked for a moment, eyes flashing open and then rolling back into her head. There. That should keep her out for a while.

Anya repeated the procedure on Josie and then crept over to Lena, rifle up and at the ready. She knew that Lena actually had military experience - years of it. Who knew how much of that she still practised today? Best to be extra careful with this one.

As she approached, she spotted a glint of silver at Lena’s neck. The locket she always wore. It had fallen open while she slept. There was just enough light for Anya to make out the picture inside - and she almost dropped her rifle in shock.

She’d seen that man before.

That was the soldier from the last team, the one that had cut up his teammate and come out of the Shimmer as the only survivor of his unit.

‘’You lying bitch!’’ Anya seethed, starting to connect the dots.

It was enough to wake Lena up. She stared up at Anya uncomprehendingly. ‘’What’s going on?’’

‘’No! You don’t get to ask that fucking question! You answer it!’’ Anya brought her gun down, smashing it into the side of Lena’s head, instantly knocking her unconscious.

Slinging the rifle onto her back, Anya set to dragging the three unconscious shadow puppets into the living room. She tied each to a chair, arms to the armrests and legs to the chairlegs, binding gags around their heads to keep them quiet.

She took a moment to tear the locket off Lena’s neck as she finished tying her up, turning on a small lamp so she could inspect the picture a little more closely. Definitely the soldier who’d gone mad and murdered his teammate.

In a weird way, it made sense.

Lena had acted a little off since the start. Maybe he was her brother. Or her husband. She’d claimed her husband was a soldier KIA. But that was obviously a lie. Even if he was her husband, he wasn’t dead. And there was no reason for Lena to enter the Shimmer if not to find a way to fix him.

Maybe that’s why she killed Cass.

To dissect her and find out what the Shimmer did to the human body. Fabricate a cure by taking someone who was affected apart and figure out what made it tick. And well, if people had to die to find a cure… Lena obviously wasn’t all that torn up about it. She hadn’t even had the decency of acting upset when Cass had been killed.

In hindsight, Anya could’ve known then.

She waited, impatiently, for her three captives to wake up. It took a while, probably because they’d been forcibly knocked unconscious with the butt end of an assault rifle. Anya wondered if she should feel bad about that, but somehow she didn’t. Maybe because her victims weren’t really people anymore, with the shadows having taken over their brains.

Finally, they began to stir.

Josie woke first, whimpering at the pain in her head, followed by the muffled curses of Ventress as she came to as well. Lena was last, which was expected since Anya had hit her the hardest. She spent a couple of seconds just groaning and trying to orient herself, apparently knocked hard enough that it took a second or two to just focus.

One by one, their gazes settled on Anya. Their gags were probably the only things keeping them somewhat quiet.

Anya let the locket dangle from her fingers, staring at Lena. ‘’Brother. Boyfriend. Husband?’’

Lena jerked a little at the last word.

‘’Husband,’’ Anya nodded a little. She’d been right to assume this man was Lena’s husband. ‘’Why didn’t you tell us?’’

Lena shook her head, making muffled noises through her gag. Her breathing was heavy and on the edge of panicked.

Anya glanced over at Ventress. ‘’You knew. Obviously.‘’ Then over at Josie. ‘’Did you know?’’

Josie frantically shook her head, hiccoughing with every breath. Anya nodded again. She believed Josie. Josie was probably the only person here who wouldn’t knowingly hurt people.

‘’Okay.’’ She sniffled a little, starting to pace. ‘’Okay. There are two theories of what went wrong. One is that something in here killed them. Two… is that they went crazy and killed each other. Josie nearly got killed by an alligator, and Cass,’’ her voice broke, ‘’did get killed by a bear.’’ Or maybe she hadn’t. Maybe they’d killed her. But Anya was getting to that point. ‘’So yes, theory one fits. But… I didn’t actually see a bear. And neither did Josie.’’

Ventress grunted against her gag.

‘’The only people who saw were Lena and Ventress,’’ Anya continued. ‘’So nothing’s confirmed. Everything’s on their word. Everything’s on Lena’s word.’’

Lena. It all came back to the bitch Anya had tied to a chair. She knew it. She knew Lena had been suspicious from the start. She should have expected it.

Lena protested incoherently against her gag.

‘’And what we know now,’’ Anya almost sing-songed as she got in Lena’s face, holding up the locket, ‘’what we know, is that Lena… is a liar.’’

Ventress started to struggle against her chair, grunting loudly. Anya snarled, ‘’shut the fuck up!’’ She turned back to Lena. ‘’Lena… you’re a liar. Did you kill Cass?’’

Lena quickly shook her head. Anya didn’t believe her for a second.

‘’Did you lose your shit? Or do you think I’ve lost my shit and we’re gonna fuck each other up? That’s theory two.’’ Anya was probably the sanest person in this room right now, though. She knew the truth. She was the only one who knew the whole truth. They’d know, too. She was gonna expose them for what they were, and then she was gonna tell Josie to run while she still could, before Lena and Ventress murdered her too.

Anya breathed out sharply, running her hands through her hair as she sank down to sit with her back against the wall, facing her three captives. Ventress and Lena looked somewhere between scared and angry. Josie just looked terrified.

‘’Oh God,’’ She exhaled heavily, feeling tears burn in her eyes. Her voice broke as she started speaking. ‘’When I look at my hands, and my fingerprints, I can see them moving.’’ The sob broke through before she could stop it. ‘’I can’t… If I let you go, and you tie me to a chair and cut me open…’’ she was speaking mostly to Josie, poor Josie who, just like Cass, had never wanted to hurt anyone, ‘’are my insides gonna move like my fingerprints?’’ She let out a shuddering sigh, regained her courage, forced back the tears that wanted to spill. She forced herself back to her feet, reaching into her pocket to grab her knife. ‘’But… I’m not the one tied to a chair. You are.’’

Josie sobbed at the sight of the blade in Anya’s hands. Lena made incoherent noises, trying to talk through her gag, waving her hands the best she could with her wrists tied against the chair.

Anya imagined her begging for her life and tried to suppress the hysterical bubble of laughter welling in her throat. Begging for her life - Cass had never had the chance to beg for her life! They’d just killed her, not giving a single damn about her screams, her fear, the terror that had shone through in her voice as she screamed herself raw.

Anya stepped forward, aiming her knife at Lena, wondering where she was going to cut first -

‘’Help me!’’

Anya froze. The yell came from outside, strangled and warped but in a voice she would recognize anywhere.

Again - ‘’help me!’’

Blinking, Anya straightened up, a desperate cloud of hope forming in her chest. She gasped out, ‘’Cass?’’ and let her knife slip from suddenly numb fingers, unable to believe what she was hearing. She pointed accusingly at Lena. ‘’You said she was dead.’’

Lena mumbled against her gag, shaking her head. Anya ignored her and lunged for her rifle, sprinting out of the room. Lena was no longer of any importance.

‘’Cass! Cass, I’m coming! Cass, is that you?!’’ Anya burst through the door, splintering the weak wooden boards they’d used to nail it to the frame. Nothing would keep her from Cass, not now she knew her best friend was still alive.

But what met her wasn’t Cass, but the claws of the biggest bear she’d ever seen, powerful enough to smash her to the side as if she weighed nothing. She hit the wall of the house with enough force to drive all of the air out of her lungs. Fire spread across her side, where the claws had torn straight through the skin.

Sprawled across the ground, fighting to regain her breath, Anya tried to comprehend what was going on. Where was Cass? She’d heard her, she was sure she’d heard her. Cass should be here. Why wasn’t she here?

The bear lumbered past her, into the house.

For a moment, there was silence. Then, weak and strangled and choked and barely coherent - ‘’help me!’’ in Cass’ voice, coming from inside.

Anya struggled to sit up, nothing but getting to Cass on her mind, whimpering as the gashes in her side stretched and tore further with every movement, blood soaking into her shirt and the waistband of her pants. She ignored it, scrambling for her rifle.

Cass was inside. She had to be. She’d heard her. She wasn’t so far gone that even her senses lied to her, was she? No. Cass was there. And there was a bear in there with her.

Anya had to get off her ass and go save her best friend right the fuck now before she lost her for real.

It gave her the strength to move. She staggered to her feet, using the wall to keep herself upright, nearly tripping several times before she reached the living room. She peeked around the corner.

It took her a moment to realize that she couldn’t see Cass anywhere. The bear was there instead.

Anya stared at it uncomprehendingly, right up until it opened its mouth and screamed in Cass’ voice.

For a moment, she couldn’t quite understand what she was hearing.

Then it sank in.

Cass wasn’t here. Cass was dead.

And the bear had somehow stolen Cass’ voice, and was now mocking her with it.

The anger that lanced through her was like nothing she’d ever felt before. Without even thinking about it, she stepped around the doorframe, lifted her rifle, and, screaming out her grief and anger, opened fire.

The bear roared, pushing Josie and Lena aside as it charged. Anya screamed again as she was thrown against the wall behind her, fangs coming at her face. She slid to the floor, her legs unable to support her, and desperately crawled for the stairs.

‘’No! No!!’’

Claws ripped into her calf, dragging her back down to the floor, and she yelled in agony and rage and terror, clawing at the banister with all her might, to no avail. Then the bear was on her, those claws ripping at her legs and abdomen, teeth snapping at her face, the voice of Cass in its mouth, and Anya had never hated the Shimmer more than she did now.

She fought, desperately, but she already knew it was pointless. She felt teeth graze at her jaw, tearing furrows into her skin, then clamp around her throat.

Her own screams were ringing in her ears, but louder still were the screams she remembered from Cass, reverberating around her head until she could barely hear anything else.

The teeth clamped down, sinking into her flesh with sickening ease.

Pain like nothing she’d ever felt before, for just a moment, and the sensation of her flesh tearing, muscles snapping like rubber bands, the taste of blood in her mouth…

She thought of Cass, imagined her face one last time through the fog of rage and panic and agony, took her last moment to fervently regret that she’d never had the courage to ask Cass out before this entire mess, and died.


End file.
